On this week’s episode, I’m joined by Daniel Drezner—cohost of the Space the Nation podcast with Ana Marie Cox and proprietor of the Drezner’s World Substack—to discuss the eternal popularity of zombies (most recently via the hit movie 28 Years Later, which I reviewed here) and the continued relevance of his book, Theories of International Politics and Zombies, which is now in its third edition. We chatted about the ways different political theories might confront waves of the undead and discussed how this book can help explain basic problems of international relations to even lay audiences. If you enjoyed this episode, I hope you share it with a friend!
And, as a bonus, here’s a link to a video starring Dan, me, and Across the Movie Aisle’s Alyssa Rosenberg that asked what Star Wars would have looked like if it had been shot in the style of Ken Burns’s Civil War. Enjoy!
Discussion about this episode
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Train to Busan is the fucking shit!!!! That movie slaps!
Sonny, have you considered interviewing Tony Gilroy (of Andor fame) about his research and analysis on standing up to autocracy?
Would love to have him on, have his people call my people!
He's all over YouTube right now winding down a tour about Andor. He's touched on the writings of revolutionaries and called out the Revolutions podcast.
He's not an anarchist or bomb-thrower and seems quite approachable (autodidactic and cerebral) and I'm pretty sure he's more gettable as a guest than your response implies you think he is.
I want to give you a sincere big thanks for taking the time to respond.
great interview. Revised, not revived, though also the latter in spirit.
No the second one is the Revived Edition.
double posting -- at the time of covid I marveled that our technological prowess had never been higher, but somehow our political class had seemingly never been worse -- we were "out of sync" i thought...
being the stupid optimistic i was then, i thought "well we'll probably get back to better politics after this, after everyone sees how amazing it is not one but several vaccines in a year..."
But no, not only did we not do that, but the lions eat your face crowd seem intent on evening things up don't they -- the wrong way though...
what do the want? apparently if we're going to have a plague, why it's going to be a god fearing one by gummit... no fancy pants vax tech is saving your ask.
not exactly topical but zombies to me have always glossed over one fatal conceptual flaw -- maggots. these dead-alive things would be quickly eaten away by hordes of fly larvae.
This was fun. One of the "problems" with COVID is that it wasn't very lethal compared to something like smallpox or ebola, and children were very resilient.
If it had a fatality rate of 5%, and/or was more lethal in children, I think the public response to the vaccine would've been more positive.
more death!